Here is the problem in writing letters to your kids—perhaps especially as a writer, who has arguably spent her entire professional life writing letters to everyone who isn’t her kids: How do you suddenly start writing in a grand literary fashion to two small people whom, heretofore, you pretty much have only talked to as follows: “Did you brush?” “Did you wash your hands?” “Did you put it in the hamper?” and “Don’t flush it before I can see it.”

Peep here for a meditation on writing letters to your little Yous, and to read missives sent from the likes of Fitzgerald, Vonnegut, and Sexton to their offspring.

Polly Dugan is "completely unashamed of her material, which is the often-shame-inducing terrain of family and its discontents and its malcontents. And her new book of stories—which could be a novel, but isn’t, thank God—goes about laying bare the secrets of one family, and therefore every family." ...more

When summer arrived, the butler for the newcomer the villagers called “Mister Way”—they couldn’t pronounce Hemingway—came into town to fetch the boys. He left the house and followed the long drive to the gate, turned into the village, gathered the boys from their homes and led them back to the Finca, where they found a baseball diamond marked out in the grass. ...more

In Japanese martial arts, the uke is the 'receiver' of the technique, the one who attempts to attack their sparring partner, the tori. The tori defends against the attack of the uke, who usually winds up on the floor after getting flipped, swept, thrown, punched, or kicked....more

There was no getting around the fact that a writer had to know who he was in relation to guns. He had to pick them up or not pick them up, but if he was going to not pick them up, he had to all the way not pick them up....more

Everything I have, aside from what I’m wearing, is in a light brown vinyl purse with two outside pockets. I hold the purse close at all times, and I sleep with it under my head like a rigid, desperate pillow....more

My daughter likes to bang her head off the floor. It makes a point—an especially guilt-tinged one, given that we had to get rid of our carpets due to a mold infestation, so now there’s no cushion between baby cranium and wood....more

It will make them smarter! Elaine Reese writes at The Atlantic about the slew of benefits to your children when you share family stories with them, including being able to tell a more complete narrative to others and a better understanding of thoughts and emotions.

Every day, my friend Laura brightens up my Facebook news feed. A gifted writer and mother of three precocious children, she relays their conversations, poignant moments, and hilarious activities with style and wit. I love her children: the deep thoughtfulness of her son, her daughter’s sass, and the smushy cheeks on her baby.

“Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.”

Neil Gaiman offers strong words at The Guardian on why libraries, reading, and daydreaming is vital to our future.

I’m a student, I say. My teacher has told me to go to a cemetery and find a stone, any stone, that speaks to me. I chose Kenda’s because hers gave more information, more anything, than any other stone I saw in the one cemetery I visited....more

At five, at six, I knew that the cemetery was full of dead bodies rotting away in boxes under the ground, and I knew that I would be one of those bodies under the ground one day, too. I could imagine myself dead; I could imagine it, and I did….Sometimes I would force these thoughts upon myself as if to test their power, or my power to resist them.

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